in reply to Guess I don't have \Q and \E figured out yet...

This particular problem has little to do with regexes and/or \Q. \a in a doublequoted string will be interpreted as 0x07; the reason your fix works is because you're backslashing the \.

You didn't actually have "the a by itself" -- by the time your string gets to the regex, \a has already been interpreted as a beep, and so applying \Q leaves you with a backslashed beep. In fact, anything *but* \\a in the original string constant (e.g. using \Q or quotemeta) will be too late to do anything but leave you with a backslashed beep.

hdp.

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\Q and \E vs. quotemeta?
by Albannach (Monsignor) on Apr 30, 2001 at 20:47 UTC
    OK, that seems clear hdp, but I'm confused by the following snippet (using \t instead of \a for visibility) in which perlfunc:quotemeta appears to behave differently than /Q/E: 
    $foo = "\tfoo";
$_ = ">>ha<<\n";  s/ha/$foo/;      print;
$_ = ">>ha<<\n";  s/ha/\Q$foo\E/;  print;
quotemeta $foo;  # update: this is doing nothing!
$_ = ">>ha<<\n";  s/ha/$foo/;      print;

$foo = '\tfoo';
$_ = ">>ha<<\n";  s/ha/$foo/;      print;
$_ = ">>ha<<\n";  s/ha/\Q$foo\E/;  print;
quotemeta $foo;  # update: this is doing nothing!
$_ = ">>ha<<\n";  s/ha/$foo/;      print;

    [download]
    which produces: 
    >>      foo<<
>>\     foo<<
>>      foo<<
>>\tfoo<<
>>\\tfoo<<
>>\tfoo<<

    [download]
    What am I forgetting here?

    Update Aarghhh! How bloody embarrassing! Thanks tye, that's what I get for minimizing my keystrokes!
    Useless use of quotemeta in void context at D:\Perl\tmp\quotemeta.pl line 9.
    Useless use of quotemeta in void context at D:\Perl\tmp\quotemeta.pl line 15.
    /me smacks himself in the forehead

    --
    I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

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[d/l]
[select]
      $foo= '\t\a\b\c';
print "foo=($foo)\n";
quotemeta $foo;
print "foo=($foo)\n";
$foo= quotemeta $foo;
print "foo=($foo)\n";
__END__
Produces:
foo=(\t\a\b\c)
foo=(\t\a\b\c)
foo=(\\t\\a\\b\\c)

      [download]

      That is, quotemeta doesn't modify in place, it returns a modified value so your uses of quotemeta are useless.

      If you had turned on warnings, then you would have been told: Useless use of quotemeta in void context at quotemeta.pl line 5. which is why we often urge people to do stuff like that. q-:

              - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
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